_By_ Sir Arthur T. Quiller-Couch
_Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry_
I
“It is strange, though,” said the gardener’s wife in Flemish, standing
in the doorway of the chapel and studying, while she shook her duster,
the tall pigeon-house in the centre of the courtyard. “The birds have
not come back yet. Not a sign of them.”
“They never like it when their house is cleaned out,” responded
Philomène, the middle-aged maid-of-all-work, just within the doorway.
She, too, had a duster and, perched on a step-ladder insecurely—she
weighed, by our English reckoning, a good fifteen stone—was flapping the
dust from a tall crucifix nailed above the lintel. “The good man told me
he had collected close on two pecks.”
“He is down in the garden digging it in around the roses. He says that
it will certainly rain to-night.”
“It has been raining to the southward all the afternoon,” said
Philomène, heavily descending her step-ladder and shielding her eyes to
stare up at the western window, through the clear quarrels of which the
declining sun sent a ray from under heavy clouds. “That will be by
reason of the guns.”
“Thunder,” suggested the gardener’s wife.
“The guns bring the thunder; it is well known.” In her girlhood
Philomène had been affianced to a young artilleryman; she had lost him
at Landrecy twenty-one years ago, and had never since owned another
lover or wished for one.
“Ah, well—provided they leave us alone, this time!” sighed the
gardener’s wife. She gazed across to the stable-buildings where, by a
flight of cup steps leading to the hay-loft, her two children, Jean and
Pauline, were busy at play with Antoine, son of a small farmer, whose
homestead, scarcely a mile away, aligned the high-road running south
from the capital.
The school in the neighbouring village had been closed for two days; and
to-morrow, being Sunday, would make a third holiday anyhow. Yesterday
Jean and Pauline had been Antoine’s guests at a picnic breakfast in the
sand-pit opposite his father’s farm (there were domestic reasons why
they could not be entertained in the house), and had spent four blissful
hours watching the army—their army, horse, foot, and artillery, all
within toss of a biscuit—march past and southward along the chaussée.
To-day it was their turn to be hosts; and all the long afternoon, with
intervals for light refreshment, the three children had been conducting
a series of military operations from the orchard-hedge through the
orchard, across a sunken ditch, through the terraced garden (with
circumspection here, for the gardener was swift to detect and stern to
avenge paternally any footmark on his beds), through the small
fruit-garden (where it was forbidden to eat the under-ripe currants),
the barnyard, among the haystacks, the outbuildings, to the courtyard
and a grand finale on the stable steps. Here Napoleon (Antoine, in a
cocked hat of glazed paper) was making a last desperate stand on the
stair-head, with his back to the door of the loft and using the broken
half of a flail en moulinet to ward off a combined “kill” by the Prince
of Orange (Jean) and the British Army (Pauline). Jean wielded a hoe and
carried a wooden sword in an orange-coloured scarf strapped as waistband
around his blouse. But Pauline made the most picturesque figure by far.
She had kilted her petticoat high, and gartered her stocking low,
exposing her knees. On her head through the heat of action she carried
an old muff strapped under her chin with twine. Her right hand menaced
the Corsican with a broomstick; her left arm she held crooked, working
the elbow against her hip while her mouth uttered discordant sounds as a
bagpipe.
“Pauline—Pauline!” called her mother. “Mais, tais-toi donc—c’est à
tue-tête! Et d’ailleurs nu-genoux! C’n’est pas sage, ça....”
“C’est le pibrock, maman,” called back the child, desisting for a
moment. “J’suis Ecossaise, voilà!”
She had seen the Highland regiments yesterday, and the sight had given
her a new self-respect, a new interest in warfare; since (as she
maintained against Antoine and Jean) these kilted warriors must be
women; giantesses out of the North, but none the less women. “Why, it
stands to reason. Look at their clothes!”
The gardener’s wife left discipline to her husband. She took a step or
two out into the yard, for a glance at the sun slanting between the
poplar top of the avenue. “It’s time Antoine’s father fetched him,” she
announced, returning to the chapel. “And what has happened to the birds
I cannot think. One would say they had forgotten their roosting house.”
“The birds will return when the corn is spread,” answered Philomène
comfortably. “As for little Antoine, if he be not fetched, he shall have
supper, and I myself will see him home across the fields. The child has
courage enough to go alone, if we pack him off now, before nightfall;
but I doubt the evil characters about. There are always many such in the
track of an army.”
“If that be so,” the gardener’s wife objected, “it will not be pleasant
for you, when you have left him, to be returning alone in the dark. Why
not take him back now before supper?”
Philomène shrugged her broad shoulders. “Never fear for me, wife; I
understand soldiery. And moreover, am I to leave the chapel unredded on
a Saturday evening, of all times?”
“But since no one visits it——”
“The good God visits it, service or no service. What did Father Cosmas
preach to us two Sundays ago? ‘Work,’ said he, ‘for you cannot tell at
what hour the Bridegroom cometh’—nor the baby, either, he might have
said. Most likely the good man, Antoine’s father, has work on his hands,
and doctors so scarce with all this military overrunning us. I dreamt
last night it would be twins. There now! I’ve said it, and a Friday
night’s dream told on a Saturday——”
“Wh’st, woman!” interrupted the gardener’s wife, in a listening
attitude; for the shouts of the children had ceased of a sudden.